Hi there.
However you found my little blog doesn’t matter, I’m glad you found it.
Before I start about myself, I’ll explain the url of my blog. Mimor has been my online alter-ego for a long time, and I live in Belgium, hence the .be TLD there 🙂
But that’s probably not what you’d expect to read when clicking the “About me” link. So without further ado:
My full name is Mike Morraye.
Born in 1986 at Roeselare, Belgium. Since then, I’ve lived for some time in Dentergem, Lede, Gentbrugge and Ghent (Yes, they can all fit in this tiny Belgium)
Right now, I live in Ghent and I’m here to stay!
First steps in the world of Linux
Somewhere 2005 I installed Suse Linux 9.0 on my dad’s Pentium 3 computer. No he did not like it, not even one bit.
I’ve spend lot’s of time dual-booting as his bloody ASUS AAM6000UG USB ADSL modem didn’t work on Linux.
That’s the point I started to ‘fiddle’ with it. But never got the damn USB Modem to work… 🙁
From Suse I went to Fedora Core as my main desktop OS, mainly because I did not like the Yast interface. Also the online community around Suse seemed mostly German at that time.
A little after Fedora Core became Fedora (5) and they added plasma to KDE, I found myself forced to switch to something new.
Going over CentOS, Debian and Mandriva (+some spin-offs), I stranded on Ubuntu (7.04).
Ubuntu has proven itself a worthy desktop environment for my needs.
On my netbook (Samsung X360) I’m currently running Arch linux. And so far, I find it the second best thing that ever happened to me. (I have to think about my Girlfriend reading this)
The Arch linux is set up to be as minimal as possible.
Using Slim as a login-manager, Awesome Windows Manager (tiling), feh as image manipulator, Xterm, mplayer-nogui, alsamixer, Chromium, etc…My netbook died 🙁 RIP 2012
My passe-temps
In my spare time, I’m fiddling around with various hard- and software configurations. Finding new purposes for old hardware, or reconfiguring my router(s) over and over again. I’m trying to get a bit in to electronics with the help of my borderless-electronics Arduino-clone.
Next to all this, I’m a member of the Whitespace, the Ghent local hacker space and member of the Ubuntu-be LoCo team.
Professional life
Student
In my professional life, I’ve started out doing dishes at a local pub when I was still in school. When I had finished all the dishes, I moved on to my first job in IT, P&P Software Solutions.
P&P Software solutions
P&P software solutions was active in a broad range of the IT spectrum.
We had over the counter hardware sales. Ranging from cd’s to high-end gaming-rigs, provided repair and support services.
We did set up and maintained SMB solutions for different growing company’s in a various of business fields. This could range from developing warehousing-, stock tracking- or sales applications, setting up and maintaining servers to introducing whole new networks.
In between al this, we managed a few ASP websites.
The reason I had to quit at P&P was because of my boss’s decision to put a halt to the business (and the stress), and join the ranks of programmers at some big fancy enterprise. 🙂
I got laid off, with a good understanding between my employer and me. I even got a bunch of very nice recommendation letters.
Digipolis
I followed the tracks of my boss, and applied for a job at a big (but different) firm, Digipolis.
This is the company behind all of the IT work done by the city of Ghent. I assume I don’t have to explain that a city with a population of 250000 heads, requires quite an IT infrastructure to operate.
All that, from planning,developing to maintaining is being done by Digipolis.
I settled for a far less interesting job than my previous one (but I had no idea at first). I’ve been doing technical phone support. From time to time, I could join in on some little project and show my ambition.
In 2012 I applied for an application as BI developer and passed the tests. To all the people that get this chance, take it! It’s a wonderful function where you learn business processes, flows, statistics, programming, data-warehousing and much more…
The only downside, to me, was that in this environment I only had to deal with Microsoft products. And there was in no way a close future where the city would make a switch to Open Source products.
But somehow, this didn’t last very long.
As if someone could read my thoughts, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Openminds
I got invited to join the ranks of Openminds. A young hosting company, known for it’s technical skills, no-nonsense business, and use of bleeding edge technology.
It’s one of those places where you feel a bit like a family to each-other.
But the best part, is that close to all used technology is open source.
Even the tools that are being developed for internal use, are getting open sourced. Check out the Openminds github page!
Also be sure to keep an eye on the blog, as it’s getting a lot of updates.
If you happen to live in Belgium, and you’re into IT, be sure to follow up on our tech-talks. We’ve covered a range of stuff, such as how to use GIT, capistrano, Varnish, or our own tool Sneakers.
I started out as a linux operator to setup systems, provide support and do maintenance. As the marked shifted, and automation and cloud-tech (such as CloudStack) is the way to go, this job has now evolved from pure ops- to devops-tasks.
We’re maintaining whole clusters trough the use of Opscode’s Chef.
If you are an sysadmin, and have never used Chef, puppet or Ansible, it’s about time you start looking into it.
Openminds is also the company behind Arrrrcamp, and if you are a Ruby dev you should know this AWESOME Ruby conference.
I can gladly say, this has been the coolest workplace I’ve ever been to…
That’s it for now.
If you have any further questions or remarkts, feel free to contact me.